Читать книгу Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 2 - Anne Dambricourt Malasse - Страница 23

Marcellin Boule counted on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to succeed him to the chair of Paleontology. Emile Licent maintained his correspondence with his Jesuit colleague in 1921, urging him to come to Tien Tsin. He was an unofficial advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Beijing. When Teilhard did not return his letters, he turned to his Swedish geologist colleague, Johan Andersson (1874–1960), who was attached to the laboratory of Carl Wiman (1867–1944) at Uppsala University. Andersson was also an advisor to geologist Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936), director of the Mining Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing, and at the head of major paleontological prospecting programs organized with the Americans at the New York Museum.

A fossiliferous karst system had just been discovered under his direction, at Zhoukoudian (Choukoutien) not far from Beijing, by two paleontologists, the Austrian Otto Zdansky (1894–1988), attached to his laboratory, and the American Walter Granger (1872–1941) of the American “Andrews” expedition. They collected fauna from the Lower Pleistocene (more than 700,000 years old) and a stone tool in quartz. Zdansky found a human-looking molar, but, refraining from talking about it, he brought it back with other fossils to be cleaned in Carl Wiman’s laboratory, where he would find a second tooth in the collection. Licent persisted and wrote to Teilhard on August 13, 1922 from the Ordos, in the great loop of the Yellow River (Huang-Ho), south of the Gobi Desert. The letter was accompanied by fossils of an unknown genus of giraffe. At the same time, Teilhard was in Brussels for the 13th International Congress of Geology, during which he met Wong Wen Hao (1889–1971), a colleague of Ding Wenjiang. The two Chinese geologists had just created the Geological Survey of China. Wong spoke French and had obtained a doctorate in geology in 1912 after training at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). Particularly involved in the development of the new Republic of China founded in 1912, he was Vice-President in 1947 and Prime Minister of the government of Chiang Kai-shek in 1948³. Wong described the research organization to Teilhard, explaining that the Geological Survey of China worked in close collaboration with paleontologists and geologists from Uppsala and the American Museum of Natural History. They were expecting good harvests of Tertiary mammals with the “Andrews” expeditions. Their programs also included the collection of old hominids from the Zhoukoudian karst. Edouard Licent was thus well integrated into the geologist-paleontologist community of Beijing with large-scale American projects. His letters sent to Marcellin Boule were the unexpected chance for France to engage in this new great exploratory phase of continental Asia where the British Empire had not extended its colonies.

When Teilhard received Licent’s letter a few months later, he realized the chance for the Muséum to collaborate with the biologist from the Jesuit Mission in China. The Professor of geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris could become the leader of the research on the evolution of mammals in continental Asia with the Muséum and the IPH. On November 20, 1922, he formalized the cooperation by publishing a note on giraffes at the Academy of Sciences and convinced Marcellin Boule to organize the first “French Paleontological Mission in China” as soon as possible. In 1923, an agreement was reached between the Muséum and three financial backers, the Ministry of Public Instruction, the Académie des Sciences and the IPH. Teilhard de Chardin was officially attached to the IPH as a geologist-paleontologist with a spacious office reserved for chair professors and which was assigned to him until December 1954.

He was therefore commissioned on behalf of the IPH to enrich the collections. In accordance with the Jesuits, the single specimens would be sent to France, while duplicates would remain at the Museum of Tien-Tsin. The latter would be entirely financed by the French State (French Embassy and Mission for the fieldworks and studies of Teilhard). The reasons for his visits to China were exclusively scientific.

Teilhard left the Catholic Institute of Paris during the summer vacation and planned to resume his classes at the start of the 1923 academic year, unaware that he had just lost his status as professor. A confidential note written on the dogma of “original sin” confronted with the simian origins of Man was sent to the Holy Office which immediately suspended his teaching duties. Teilhard joined Licent in Tien-Tsin to explore the Ordos loop of the Yellow River. As early as 22 July, 1923, they discovered the first Chinese prehistoric locality in situ at Shui-Dong-Gou (Choei Tung K’eou). They returned with three tons of fossils loaded on 30 donkeys and mules and sent 100 kg of stone tools to the IPH. The prehistoric collection was presented to the Academy of Sciences by its perpetual secretary, Alfred Lacroix (1863–1948), geologist at the Muséum, who obtained the funds for the Mission. The lithic technology dated from the ancient Upper Paleolithic (40,000–25,000 years). This presentation marked the official birth of Chinese prehistory. Lacroix wrote to Teilhard to announce the continuation of the Mission on the orders of Marcellin Boule and the Jesuit Superior General. Relations with the Holy Office were tense, and he was forced to spend the winter of 1923/1924 between Tien-Tsin and Beijing.

In France, Louis Vialetton was deconstructing Lamarcko-Darwinian gradualism. Teilhard took advantage of this discovery to affirm his position and wrote a text in 1925 entitled “L’hominisation. Introduction à une étude scientifique du Phénomène humain” (Hominization. Introduction to a scientific study of the human phenomenon), which was unpublished until 1957:

Illusion, the ordered, organized, inescapable distribution of the living through time and space? This I deny with all the strength of my paleontological experience. There is a natural (i.e. scientific) reason for the phenomenon of their successive appearance. (Teilhard de Chardin, Le paradoxe transformiste, 1925, author’s translation)

Vialleton did not question evolution but rather the impotence of the Lamarcko-Darwinian model to account for the complexity of organisms, and the evolution of these organized complexities, while Teilhard was convinced of an organic uniqueness between geophysics and biophysics, between organisms and their environments considered at the biospheric and atmospheric scales of the planet. He would often tend to confuse physics with nature. Physics is a scientific discipline that studies light, phenomena of attraction (magnetization), the smallest levels of organization that always refer to forces of attraction, cohesion or repulsion, electromagnetics, waves and/or particles. This science extrapolates what the eyes do not see with equations, and, for evolution, a science confronted with the phylogenetic and irreversible self-organization processes that cannot be reproduced experimentally and that will escape measurement forever. Evolution in the past is not an illusion thanks to fossils, but its explanation will always be a theory limited by the absence of its object of study: the scientific reconstruction of a series of successive ontogenetic transformations, will always be that of a disappeared duration.

Teilhard worked over long durations, which made all the difference with regard to the hyper-specialization of paleoanthropology at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, which is limited to very short periods, or to very specific taxa such as the Neanderthal, Homo erectus or Homo sapiens. Deprived of geochronological hindsight, the specialization on a short lineage of taxa is thus unable to identify an emergence process involving the central nervous system and its straightening dynamics. Limiting the study of a fossil to its ecological context would result in the simplification of the interpretation of innovative traits by placing them all at the same level: that of the variety of a trait at a given instant t, without considering the structural context, which obeys neither the same rhythms nor the same morphogenetic rules influenced by past history and stored in memory in sexual cells.

The Earth is a dynamic system that evolves ineluctably toward a state of equilibrium because of the cooling of its core; for Teilhard and the geologists this reality must never be lost sight of, under the biosphere the planet is cooling and the crust moves accordingly. Hominization is part of the irreversible organic co-evolutions of this planetary geological scale, it continues the mega-evolution that generated the increasing complexity of the nervous system and of the organization that it controls, this evidence is no longer perceived today because of the hyper-specialization on fossil anatomical details.

For Teilhard, the formation of the biosphere was prolonged by the “anthroposphere”. He distinguished the place of the human phenomenon in this mega-evolution thanks to long geological durations. Hominization was said to be orthogenetic, or oriented, and he called it “orthogenèse de fond” or “background orthogenesis”, insofar as it prolonged the complexification of the central nervous system. Teilhard developed his thought by comparing the human lineage from the prosimian stem with other mammalian phylums he studied. The Paninae (gorilla and chimpanzee) and the hominins have a common ancestor, but Paninae’s lineage diverged from this “background orthogenesis” 8 million years ago, forming divergent branches, whereas hominins were the manifestation of this “background orthogenesis”, they were the apex of the growing trunk. And China was going to prove it with what the eyes see immediately: the organization of the cerebral hemispheres.